Authors: Lynn Viehl
Another one of the nightmares, and now it had opera in it.
She grabbed the edge of the futon, using it to pull herself up to grab her watch and check the time. It was either eight a.m. or eight p.m. She really needed to invest in an alarm clock.
It took a while for her to wake up, not that she didn’t seriously consider crawling back under the covers and hiding there for the rest of her life. She drank two cups of coffee, one in the bathroom, where she saw what looked like the remains of a black eye instead of the beginnings of one. Hopefully her ability to heal quickly would get rid of most of it by the time she had to go to work.
As Dansant’s new sous-chef
, an evil, gleeful little voice inside her head reminded her as she dressed. And wouldn’t that promotion make her everyone’s best friend.
On her way back and forth to wash up, she eyed Meriden’s door. She remembered Sean coming in her apartment, the soggy cuddling session, and not much else. There were no signs he’d done anything while she’d slept in his lap except put her to bed, not that she thought he would have. She would have never pegged him as a guy who would offer his shoulder to cry on. The breaking and entering, now, that was more his style.
She had unfinished business with Sean Meriden, but it would have to wait until she figured out a way to deal with Dansant.
Rowan made a bowl of cereal and idly picked up one of her new books to read while she ate. This one was a memoir, written in the late nineteenth century by an ex-priest who had been sent to exorcise some people who thought they were vampires, and in the process had lost his faith and given up the cassock.
According to the introduction the ex-priest had penned the memoir while he was in his eighties, which meant he’d gone vampire-busting in the late eighteenth century. The preface, written by some snotty editor, also warned that the contents were largely considered by the literary community of the time to be creative nonfiction.
There was a lot of Latin terminology to plow through, Rowan discovered, and by her third bowl of cereal she was pretty sure she agreed with the editor. The ex-priest alternated between ranting about secret societies within the church and cursed souls who’d tried to attack him and drink his blood while he’d doused them with holy water and prayed over them.
She was just about to give it up when she got to a page listing what the author had discovered about the people he referred to as “truly damned by God”:
They who are damned for eternity will be comely of appearance, the men strong and handsome, the women delicate and lovely. They exude the precious scent of God’s gift of torment, that of flowers, but it is a lie to lure and trap their unsuspecting victims. They will partake of neither food nor drink but wine. When brought into the light of heaven they will shield their eyes and grow agitated; if left in shelter they will sleep without breath or movement. They have knowledge of the black arts and wield these against their victims, each with their own spell to create confusion of the senses and to enslave with but a few words. Few can resist their murmurings and touches. They fornicate freely and respect not the bonds of marriage or betrothal. Nothing may cut their flesh but copper, which burns them like fire. They heal from any wound, but thanks be to God may be dispatched back to Hell by beheading.
She read the passage three times before she understood why it riveted her:
confusion of the senses . . . enslave with but a few words.
Last night Dansant had used a few words to stop them from being mugged. Those boys had had the perfect opportunity to roll them, and yet they had done exactly what he had told them to without a murmur. They’d acted like he’d turned them into zombies.
She began comparing what she knew about her boss with the ex-priest’s crazy list.
Strong and handsome, check. Smells like flowers, check. Never eats, never drinks anything but wine . . .
She skimmed through the rest of the book, looking for more lists, and stopped only when she saw the image of an old engraving of a Templar warrior sitting on a horse in the middle of a battlefield. It was a gory portrait, the ground around him littered with dead bodies.
The warrior-priest’s face looked exactly like that of Jean-Marc Dansant.
“No. He can’t be.” Rowan slammed the book shut as she thought frantically. She’d worked beside Dansant for weeks, had watched him cook, and she couldn’t remember a single time she had seen him taste the food. He never ate with her and the line cooks for the family meal; he would simply sit at the head of the table and drink a glass of wine. Last night when she’d given him a bowl of her stir-fry, he’d smelled it, but he hadn’t tasted it.
And in all the time she’d been here, she had never once seen him during the day.
“Oh, for Christ’s sake, he’s not a vampire.” Saying it out loud didn’t make her feel better. “He works nights. He said it was hypnosis. Maybe he wasn’t hungry.”
She opened the book and stared at the engraving again, absently touching her neck. The artist had done a lot of fine detail work; he’d added tiny lines for the eyelashes and the warrior’s mustache, and a dot on his jawline in the exact same spot where Dansant had a tiny mole. . . .
Oh, shit.
Rowan got up and ran out to the bathroom.
She checked her throat, her arms, and then stripped down to her skin and did a full body check. She found no bite marks or any signs to indicate she’d been used as a blood bank.
Of course there aren’t any marks
, that slimy, malicious voice in her head purred as she got dressed.
You heal too fast.
She didn’t know what to do. It wasn’t as if she could walk up to the executive chef and ask him if he was an immortal killer who fed on human blood. But she knew the dark kyn were a reality, and from the research she and Matthias had done, she knew they still existed in clusters all over the world, living apparently normal lives in order to hide in plain sight.
It wasn’t a stretch to believe one of them had decided to open a French restaurant.
When you want to catch a mouse, you don’t set out an empty trap. You bait it with something they can’t resist.
Speculating like this was ridiculous. What she needed was a computer, so she could run some basic checks on her boss. Looking into his background would doubtless provide logical explanations for all of his weirdness, and that would settle things.
Rowan went to the nearest branch of the New York Public Library, which was busy but fortunately provided public-access computers. She sat at an open terminal, put down the notepad she’d brought with her, and logged into her Internet account. A window with a blinking red border popped up to inform her that she had exceeded her e-mail account storage limits.
I haven’t written an e-mail in weeks
, she thought, annoyed as she entered her password for her inbox.
Must be SPAM.
It wasn’t SPAM. There were over four hundred new messages waiting to be read, and the senders column read like a Takyn roll call: Romulus, Jezebel, Vulcan, Paracelsus, Delilah, Zephyrus, Magdalene, Orion, Sapphira . . .
Before Rowan could open the first e- mail, an IM screen popped onto the monitor. The sender was Paracelsus.
P:
He jests at scars
She typed in the last words of the quote to confirm her identity:
that never felt a wound.
P:
Where are you? Are you hurt?
No
, she wrote back.
I’m fine. I’m in New York.
P:
I know. I’ve been turning it upside down looking for you.
She chuckled.
You’re still here?
P:
Of course. I wasn’t going to leave until I knew you were all right.
I’m good.
It wasn’t exactly a lie.
Sorry I haven’t been in touch.
P:
You vanished off the face of the earth for weeks. We’ve been frantic, all of us.
That explained the e-mail overload. But no one should have been worried; she always checked in. . . . Rowan frowned. She hadn’t checked in, now that she thought about it. She’d completely forgotten about her friends.
I got tied up with personal business
, she typed.
But I’m okay. Everyone else all right?
P:
No. G. sent a team to New York to take a special girl. We thought they were after you. Then they disappeared. Another player in the game.
Rowan sat back in her chair, trying to take it all in.
He couldn’t have tracked me
, she wrote back.
I dumped the bike. He doesn’t have anything on me.
P:
V. finally gained access to G.’s clubhouse. What little there is about the op says the target is a female with plenty of talent who escaped custody.
That could be any of us girls
. Yet even as she typed the reply, she remembered facing Genaro’s goons in Price Park. Technically speaking, she and Vulcan had escaped custody, although she couldn’t have left behind any DNA for them to mess with, not unless . . .
She had touched one of Genaro’s hunters. She had needed the physical contact to shift into the woman he loved most, some blond bombshell named Rosie, and tap him for information. She must have shed some skin cells when she’d dreamveiled herself.
If G. and this other player are after me
, she wrote to Paracelsus,
I should get out of Dodge now.
P:
No, my dear, it’s too dangerous. We have not yet identified this new player, and losing the team will have G. watching all points of exit. Stay where you are and keep your head down until V. and I can arrange safe passage.
Safe passage meant creating a new identity for her and relocating her across the country.
So much for Rowan Dietrich
, she thought. On the IM screen, she typed
When should I contact you again?
P:
Check in with me in a few days. I sent you my Lucky Lotto numbers. You should buy a ticket today.
That translated into instructions for her to buy a throwaway mobile phone and call him on a number he’d e- mailed her.
Okay, I’ll take care of that as soon as I leave here. My access is public, so would you pass the word around to everyone?
P:
Consider it done. Be careful, my dear.
Rowan closed the IM screen, checked Paracelsus’s e-mail and jotted down the phone number disguised as Lotto numbers, and then wiped all traces of her session from the terminal.
At a nearby convenience store, Rowan picked up a throwaway phone and a card for several hundred minutes’ worth of air time. As she stood in line to pay for it, she thought of all the e-mails stacked in her inbox. She had never received so many, and the idea that evidently all of the Takyn were worried about her made her feel absurdly pleased.
Sometimes, especially after Matthias had brought Jessa back from Atlanta, she’d felt as if she’d become more of a liability than an asset to her boss. She should have remembered that she had other friends, good friends who cared about her and wanted her to be happy.
She should have remembered . . . “That son of a bitch.”
The Puerto Rican man standing in front of her glanced back. “You talking to me, lady?”
“No. I mean my bastard of a boss.” She dragged a hand over her head. “He’s been messing with my head.”
The man grimaced in sympathy. “Mine uses a stopwatch when I take lunch. I come back five minutes late, he docks my pay.”
Rowan clenched her jaw. “Yeah, well, mine isn’t going to dock me anymore.”